1978

She walked down James Street each afternoon as though she were moving through the inside of a dream the town was having about itself.

The January heat had already settled over Bicheno long before she left the shack.

It rose from the asphalt in trembling sheets, making the road shimmer and buckle ahead of her. The tar released its dark oily smell beneath the sun. Each time she stepped onto the gravel verge to avoid a passing car, the crushed stones crackled beneath her thongs like broken shells. Dust lifted around her ankles and settled again.

Nothing hurried in Bicheno in January except light.

She carried a Midnight Mint ice cream in one hand. The chocolate coating cracked softly when she bit into it. The mint inside was shockingly cold, almost painful against her tongue after the warmth of the morning. She had bought it only moments earlier from the 4 Square shop, where the flyscreen door slapped endlessly against its frame and the air smelled of newspapers, sunscreen, mixed lollies and warm bread.

She wore faded denim shorts cut high on the thigh and a pale blue terry-towelling polo shirt that had softened through years of washing. Her long fair hair was tied loosely behind her head, already escaping in strands that curled around her cheeks. Her skin carried the deep bronze of a Tasmanian summer spent almost entirely outdoors.

Above her, the sky was enormous.

A hard blue.

The kind of blue that seemed permanent when you were sixteen.

The insects were already screaming from the trees.

Through breaks in the banksias and she-oaks she caught flashes of the sea. Not the water itself at first, but the light coming from it. Fierce white light. Blinding. Fragments of brightness flashing between the trunks like shattered mirrors.

Beyond the trees Waubs Bay lay stretched beneath the sun, turquoise over sand, dark over kelp.

She could smell it.

Salt.

Kelp drying on granite.

The faint metallic scent of seaweed left by the falling tide.

The smell mingled with warm eucalyptus and sun-baked timber fences and flowering coastal heath. It was the smell of Bicheno itself. A smell that seemed to soak into skin and remain there forever.

The Eagles were still playing inside her head. The night before, one of the shack boys had brought a cassette player down to the beach. They’d built a fire near the water and sat around it until late. Nobody had wanted to leave. The sea had rolled in and out beyond the firelight, black and endless. Someone had kissed someone. Someone had laughed too loudly. Someone had stolen another can from an esky. And through it all the Eagles had kept singing.

Hotel California

The melody had become tangled in her thoughts. Now it drifted through her mind alongside the cry of gulls and the distant thud of swell wrapping itself around Peggy’s Point.

Ahead, the Sea Life Centre slowly emerged through the heat haze. Its broad brown roof sat above the gravel carpark like something anchored there by sunlight alone. Volvos, Holdens, Falcons and Valiants stood baking beneath the sky while tourists wandered toward the entrance.

Beside the carpark ran the old open drain A narrow grassed culvert cut through the nature strip, carrying only a trickle of water this time of year. She smiled when she saw it.

As a child, she had thought it was enormous. The boys had spent entire afternoons racing their BMX bikes toward it. They would pedal hard down the slight slope off the highway, lift their front wheels at the last second and leap across the gap.

The drain had become a test.

A measure of courage.

A measure of belonging.

She had wanted desperately to clear it. The first attempt ended with gravel embedded in both knees. The second with a bent front wheel. The third with tears she swore nobody would ever see. The fourth time she flew cleanly across. She could still remember the feeling. The brief impossible weightlessness. The cheers from the other kids. The sense that she had crossed something larger than a drain.

Now the culvert seemed absurdly small. Yet the scars remained. Thin white lines crossed both knees, visible beneath the tan. They caught the sunlight when she walked. Every kid in Bicheno carried something similar.

Granite scars.

Shell cuts.

Fishing-hook punctures.

Bike crashes.

The town signed its name on the bodies of its children.

She looked down at the old marks and smiled again.

Ahead, the Sea Life Centre waited. She worked three afternoons a week through the school holidays. Officially she helped in the coffee shop and gift area, but in truth she did whatever needed doing. She stacked postcards showing Diamond Island and the Blowhole. She refilled shelves with souvenir shells. She swept gravel from the entrance every hour only to watch more blow in again. She served fish and chips to tourists from Melbourne and Sydney whose faces were already pink from the sun. She carried trays of dirty cups. Restocked bottles of Pasito and Tarax. Wiped tables sticky with raspberry cordial.

By midday the building filled with the smell of hot oil, vinegar, coffee and saltwater. Children pressed their faces against aquarium glass. Crayfish shifted slowly through tanks. Leatherjackets flickered through filtered light.

Tourists wandered from display to display speaking in hushed voices. She liked listening to them. People sounded different on holidays. Lighter. As though they had briefly escaped the lives waiting for them elsewhere.

The sea was never absent from the building. It lived in the damp smell of the tanks. In the bubbling filters. In the wet footprints crossing the floor. In the gulls calling outside. In the bright rectangle of ocean visible through the windows.

Sometimes, when things were quiet, she would stand near the windows and look toward Waubs Bay. The water would be glittering. Always glittering. As though sunlight itself had dissolved into it.

She slowed now at the edge of the carpark. The ice cream was melting quickly. Mint-green cream slipped over her knuckle. For a moment she turned toward the sea. A gull hung motionless in the wind. The granite shone white beneath the morning sun. The water flashed beyond the trees.

And though she could never have found the words for it then, standing there with salt on her lips, mint on her tongue and the Eagles still circling softly through her mind, she felt herself suspended within something larger than the morning.

The town.

The sea.

The scars on her knees.

The song.

The summer.

The strange and fleeting miracle of being sixteen.

As though the world had briefly opened and allowed her to stand inside its light.

Then she stepped across the culvert she had once spent years trying to conquer, crossed the gravel carpark, and walked toward work while the sea continued glittering behind her, indifferent and eternal, already beginning the long work of turning this ordinary morning into memory.